GSOC Past Presidents 1955-1959

1955

William F. Clark

William F. Clark was born in Battle Creek, Michigan, July 7, 1890. He was the first son of William and Mary Ferguson Clark.  The family moved to Portland in 1899.  Mr. Clark attended public schools in Portland. After completing high school, following Scotch custom, he was apprenticed to the pattern shop of the Willamette Iron and Steel Company.  Since 1929 he has been associated with the Modern Pattern Works.

May 12, 1917 he married Catharine Theresa Parkinson of Portland, Oregon.  They have a son and a daughter.

In 1948, Mr. Hollis Dole, instructor of the class in General Geology of the University of Oregon Extension, which Mr. Clark was attending, urged his students to avail themselves of the opportunities for study provided by the Geological Society of the Oregon Country. Mr. Clark joined the Society and has been an enthusiastic member ever since.

Mr. Clark is also a member of the Foundrymen's Society of America, Oregon Agate and Mineral Society, Oregon Color Slide Club and Oregon Marine Biological Society.

1956

Francis Garritt Gilchrist

Francis Garritt Gilchrist was born in the manse of the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church, where his father was minister, in Gettysburg Pennsylvania. His family moved to the west when he was two years old.

He was educated in the grammar schools of San Anselmo and San Jose, California, and in high school at San Jose and Lowell High School in San Francisco. He went to Occidental College in Los Angeles from 1914-1916. In 1917 he was Field Assistant to the U.S. Geological Survey in the Bellingham area. From 1917-1919 he served in the U. S. Army, A.E.F., 26th Engineers. After World War I he went back to college at the University of California, where he received his B. A. degree in 1921. He continued there as a graduate student and assistant in the Department of Zoology from 1921-1924 and received his PH.D in 1927. On graduation he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.

From 1924-1936 Dr. Gilchrist taught at Pomona College, Claremont California in the Department of Zoology. In 1936 he had a Research Fellowship at Yale University. From 1937-1946 he taught at Riverside Junior College, Riverside,  California. In 1946 he began teaching at Lewis and Clark College in Portland in the Department of Biology.

Dr. Gilchrist was married to Pearl May Brown on June 6, 1922. She was born at Prosser, Washington. There were two sons, Kenneth Wells, (1925-1943), and Alden Hugh, (1930-), who is a musician and composer.

Dr. Gilchrist has contributed several articles in scientific journals dealing with experiments on regeneration of coelenterates and development of amphibia. He was trustee of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry from 1955-1959, and Secretary from 1956-1959. He has served as committee Member of the Arboretum since 1957.  From 1949-1960 he has been an Elder of the First Presbyterian Church.

He has been a member of the Geological Society of the Oregon Country for about ten years. Beside the office of President he has served on the Executive Committee from 1955-1960, and as Editor of Newsletter from 1954-1955.

1957

Leroy Atwood Palmer

Leroy Atwood Palmer was born at Lockport, Illinois, June 10, 1879. He held various positions in the mineral industry from 1903 to 1909, and was a mining engineer for the U.S. Land Office, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Reclamation Service in western states and Alaska from 1909 to 1931. He then had an office in San Francisco as a consulting engineer. During and after World War II he was safety engineer at the Naval Supply Depot at Oakland and at the Marine Supply Depot at Barstow, California. He retired in 1947 and came to Portland to live.

Mr. Palmer has one son and two daughters, eleven grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

Other organizations to which Mr. Palmer belongs are: Masonic Lodge, the City Club, the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers, the Profess­ional Engineers of Oregon and the Sons of the American Revolution.

1958

Dr. James Stauffer

James Stauffer was born in Butler, Pennsylvania on April 27, 1902. He was graduated from high school and went four years to the University of Michigan, majoring in English and languages, and receiving a B. A. degree.

For a year he taught biology at the high school that he had attended at Butler, Pennsylvania, and from there he went to Berea college in Berea, Kentucky where he taught biology. He went back to the University of Michigan for one year of postgraduate work in sciences, and received his master's degree.

For eighteen years he taught biology at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. While he was there he went to summer school at Cornell University, working for his doctor's degree which he received from that college in 1937.

He was married to Paula Ford, December 26, 1928 in Dewitt, Michigan. They have two children, Norman and Bonnie, and three grandchildren, Peter, Eric and Thomas Stauffer.

Dr. Stauffer has lived in Portland eleven years, teaching biology at Lewis and Clark College. He has been a member of the Geological Society of the Oregon Country for eight years. He also belongs to the following organizations: The Oregon Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science and the University Professor's Association.

1959

Paul William Howell

Paul William Howell was born on a homestead near Quincy, Washington, on November 2, 1909. His father, Lewis Grant Howell, and his mother, Gerta Peterson Howell, were both natives of Northport, Michigan.

Finding Oregon a more pleasant place to live than the coulees of Douglas County, Washington, the Howells bought a home at Troutdale. Paul was the middle child of a family of eleven. He often wandered alone through the bottom lands of the Columbia to explore the ponds for frogs and catfish. His adventures were the inspiration for some of the newspaper articles written by Ben Hur Lampman, Paul's not infrequent fishing companion.

While attending Jefferson High School in Portland, Paul was a member of the Glee Club. Intrigued by the stories his brother, Quincy, told of college life, Paul Joined him at the University of Oregon from 1930 to 1932 and majored in Geology. The depression, a broken leg, and love interrupted his education. Paul and Margaret Reynolds were married December 26, 1936.

Paul worked for the Oregon Highway Department. He hiked five and six days a week as a surveyor; on Sundays with his wife, he would explore the hills as a geologist. Moves became frequent and the geologic history of the country became more and more interesting. While living and working out of Klamath Falls, Paul became a member of the Geological Society of the Oregon Country in 1938.

In September 1940, Paul enrolled at the University of Washington. There he studied under J. Hoover Macken, one of his favorite instructors. While there he became an active member of the Amenite Club. A month before the graduation ceremonies where he was to receive his Bachelor of Science degree in June of 1942, he joined the Army. Within a week the 333rd Engineer's Regiment was in Louisiana. At Ft. Belvoir, Virginia, he was graduated from OCS in December 1943.

His son, Vincent Ernest, was born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on May 6, 1944. Paul received the message of his birth minutes later at Camp Shelby and completely lost his dignity as an officer.

Celia Louise arrived November 8, 1945 while Paul was in Poland. It was twenty days before Paul received that message. He had rejoined the 333rd Engineer regiment in Europe as a First Lieutenant. Arriving home in Eugene, April 1st, 1946, he started the next week on his first job as a geologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

"Little Paul," Paulette Carol, was born in Portland, June 30, 1948. She learned to walk a year later in Lowell where her father was project geologist for the Lookout Point and Dexter Dams.

In the summer of 1952, the Howell family moved to Arizona. Aided by a student fellowship, Paul worked for two summers at the University of Arizona in Tucson of the Navajo-Hopi Indian Reservation doing a Mineral Survey and collecting data for his dissertation: "The Cenozoic Geology of the Chetoh Country, Arizona and New Mexico."

Paul did exploration work for the Bear Creek Mining Company the summer of 1954. in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In 1955 and 1956, he was the Arizona State Mineralogist. Between jobs he continued his graduate study at the University of Arizona and was elected to Sigma Xi in 1954.

The Howells returned to Portland in 1956. Paul worked as the Supervising Geologist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers In 1959, he flew back to Tucson to attend a Geological Society of America meeting and to receive his doctorate in geology from the University of Arizona.

Dr. Howell is affiliated with the Oregon Engineering Geologists, and the Geological Society of America. He has served the Geological Society of the Oregon Country as consulting geologist for the President's Camp-out in 1969 and as trip leader for the society during 1968 and 1969.

On Nov. 8, 1969, he retired from the Army Corps of Engineers. As of March 1970, Br. Howell is an adjunct professor of geology at Portland State University.